Pine Creek

Visited: late dry season

Recommendation: If you are passing through Pine Creek to or from Darwin, you must stay at the Lazy Lizard. If the great food and even better Happy Hour don't do it for you, then wander outside and trip over a flock of Hooded Parrot!

Pine Creek is a dusty little town in the middle of nowhere and you drive through it, it's very quiet, not a lot of activity and you'd probably be fairly safe in thinking there's not much wildlife here and drive on through. But Pine Creek is one of the best birding places I have seen in all my travels through Australia. It is totally wonderful from start to finish and as soon as I left I was just looking forward to returning.

I stayed at the Lazy Lizard which is one of the best caravan parks I've ever been to. It has a bar, a restaurant and it has the most amazing features with old recycled, repurposed cartwheels, beer barrels and wooden beams. It is a very pleasant place to spend your time but that's just the start.

Outside the Lazy Lizard is a stretch of grass with some toilets, a little skate park, playground and some trees. To the left over the road are a series of small ponds and to the right is a railway museum. It looks fairly innocuous but the trees are mangoes and if you're there at the right time of year there is no end of birds circling, sitting, feeding, playing and socializing all over the place. All these photos were taken from this area. All these birds were feeding on mangoes which was just absolutely lovely to watch and gave great photographic opportunities.

Australasian Figbird (Sphecotheres vieilloti)

Red-collared Lorikeet (Trichoglossus rubritorquis)

Red-winged Parrot (Aprosmictus erythropterus)

Black Fruit Bat (Pteropus alecto)

Blue-winged Kookaburra (Dacelo leachii)

Further down on the right hand side are more trees and you can tell from them from a fair way away that there are bats there. The bats are the Black Fruit Bats and they are noisy in the day absent in the night and. At times you can catch them out in the sunlight which also makes for great photography. Other times raptors would circle including a White-bellied Sea-Eagle would be present although I never saw any water anywhere. It was usually chased off by a mob of these angry birds which was great to watch.

White-bellied Sea-Eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster)

Green Oriole (Oriolus flavocinctus)

Blue-faced Honeyeater (Entomyzon cyanotis)

But the highlight of this area where the Hooded Parrots. They came in early in the morning and late in the afternoon to feed in the trees and on the ground. I'd never seen these birds before I got to Pine Creek, and I think I only ever saw them once or twice again throughout the Northern Territory after I left Pine Creek. And yet here, they are out in the open, active, busy, and entirely photographable.

I think they must be related to the Golden-shouldered Parrot, because they're on the same latitude as the Golden-shouldered in Cape York, and they look very similar just with that darker head. This is by far the easiest place that you're ever going to find to see them, and worth a stop at Pine Creek alone.

Heading out overnight, I had high hopes for the small ponds. There was a series of four or five of them and they look fresh and clean. There were some froggy noises but apart from a stupid plastic crocodile, I didn't actually see too much. But I did get this Western Tree Frog sitting right outside the caravan park.

Western Tree Frog (Polypedates occidentalis)

In the mornings, I would walk behind the caravan park on the suburban streets, while I was waiting for the parrots to come in, and this turned out to be a really cool place to find more birds. Crimson, Masked and Double-barred Finches were all here, and the Golden-headed Cisticol called from the bushes beside the road. There were also woodswallows, cuckooshrike, honeyeaters and babblers too.

Crimson Finch (Neochmia phaeton)

Golden-headed Cisticola (Cisticola exilis)

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